Defending Java

When I started programming professionally 4 years ago, trolling Java was becoming a popular sport, especially in the startup and dynamical languages world. I’ve often joined in myself.

Now, when I try to look at Java with a less biased eye, I see some amazing languages and technologies built on the Java platform. Clojure, Scala, Android’s Dalvik VM, the Play framework, Jruby, Hadoop, Lucene… the list goes on. JVM must have done something right for all this to have happened.

So when I heard someone exclaim “I hate Java”, I couldn’t help but be reminded of me a few years ago, saying pretty much the same things.

I still don’t use any a JVM based language for development. For the few weeks that I had to use Java, I didn’t enjoy writing code very much. I still think Java isn’t the most elegant language. But I’ve stopped complaining about Java with eloquent arguments like “it sucks”. After all, the JVM exists because of this “ugly” language.

Hi, I’m Nithin Bekal.
I work at Shopify in Ottawa, Canada.
Previously, co-founder of
CrowdStudio.in and
WowMakers.
Ruby is my preferred programming language,
and the topic of most of my articles here,
but I'm also a big fan of Elixir.
Tweet to me at @nithinbekal.